August 24, 2015

Arma 3, PAX Prime, and Lugging a Supercomputer Around

I didn't really play EVE today. I had a courier contract delivered to me in our staging system so I logged in to fit the ships up, but that was about it. I played a bit of League of Legends instead of EVE tonight. Slowly climbing back up to where I was last season. It's painful sometimes. But my Quinn game is strong.

I've also been getting Arma withdrawals. The Arma group that we had in TRUST has sort of pittered out. There are still 7 people in the Mercenary Coalition Arma Slack channel. We've added one new guy from Noir (Primus Fortune) and one new guy from Mercenary Coalition (spacebar). So that puts us back to about half strength of what we were at our max in TRUST. I hope some more people will be interested. I've always wanted to have 10-12 guys playing every other week or so regularly.

I could go find another actual Arma unit, but they usually play when I can't, plus I don't want that much commitment. The nice thing about playing Arma with EVE people is that they understand Arma isn't the primary game for you.

I did find a couple of people that may be interested in playing with us via the Tweetfleet Slack (which I highly recommend joining if you like talking to a lot of other EVE guys). I don't know how I'll coordinate that very effectively, some people in one Slack, other guys in another Slack. I don't even know if they're interested in downloading a shit ton of mods to play with us.

If we do get it off the ground, I'd really like to make some more one-off missions. Typically I'll put together these big, dynamic missions where the two opposing forces will vie for control of the entire map, which is seriously awesome to see in effect when it goes well. But, they're usually not as engaging as smaller, more focused missions can be, especailly with a more casual crowd.

The problem with that is I don't want to be the only one responsible for new missions. I'd love for some of the other guys to pitch in so we can have a good, stable crop of solid missions even when I'm really busy with work. But it's kind of my show, I'm the one rounding everyone up and getting them motivated to play, I'm the most dedicated, hardcore player of the group. That makes it hard to convince anyone else to spend time learning how to make missions. I do have one corpmate who has showed interest but never completed anything. Perhaps one day.

This weekend I go to Seattle for PAX Prime. Is anyone else going to be there? I'd love to meet up with a few other EVE players while I'm there. I'm considering taking my big Razer Blade Pro with me so I can play some EVE and Arma if I want, but haven't decided if it's worth the trouble. It's svelt for a computer that has this much power, but it's definitely no light weight.